I attended the Pathways webinar and it looks like a great product. But the reality for this customer was it was too expensive for the functionality they're looking for. Honestly I think that having multiple ways to achieve a course badge should be a default for Moodle.
But here's what I came up with. We created a set of Page resources that have access restrictions on them. Depending on what path the learner takes through the course's content a corresponding Page will become available to them.
All of these pages are formatted the same. They are titled "Congratulations on completing the course! Click here to receive your badge." The page contents provide directions to get their badge.
Completion tracking on the pages is set to "View". So as soon as they click the page, it's marked as "complete".
Then we have the course set to be complete if ANY of those pages are complete.
And the course badge is set to award upon course completion
So as soon as they click the page it triggers this chain of events.
Page is completed, which completes the course, which awards the badge.
It's all looking good in testing. We haven't tested it with a live course yet.